DigiByte was created by programmer and entrepreneur Jared Tate with the goal of creating a fast and secure cryptocurrency that could reach a wider and more decentralized community than Bitcoin. The first Digibyte block was mined on January 10, 2014, and included the headline from USA Today: “Target: Data stolen from up to 110M customers," hashed into the Genesis block to mark the importance of security in digital transactions.

DigiByte pioneered asymmetrical difficulty adjustment mining with DigiShield, which is a widely used technology and the basis of many other blockchains. It is also the first blockchain to fork from a single proof-of-work algorithm to multi-algorithm mining, and in April 2017 DigiByte became the second major cryptocurrency blockchain (following Groestlcoin) to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit) via the DigiSync soft fork.